Abstract
In this chapter I reflect on the challenges and paradoxes of representing the other in critical research. Particular attention is given to implicit configurations of subject/object or self/other in approaches informed by both rational/theoretical and caring/humanistic methodologies. Drawing on an extended qualitative study of ten women with traumatic brain injury, I explore the contradictory and often latent assumptions about researcher subjectivity and the possibility and meaning of knowing the object/other of research either through unity or through distance. Rather than resolving the ethical dilemmas and dangers posed by a field and a researcher/subject caught up in the will to know, the chapter concludes by pointing to the implications of ethical practice grounded in the fragmentary and unstable nature of the researcher as a “virtual self”.
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Notes
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Ethics clearance obtained from University of Illinois Urban-Champaign (UIUC) (first in 1996, with renewals for eight subsequent years); at Carle Hospital in Urbana, Illinois (1996); and at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (1996 and 1998).
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Stewart, E. (2018). Subjects and Objects: An Ethic of Representing the Other. In: Macleod, C., Marx, J., Mnyaka, P., Treharne, G. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Ethics in Critical Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74721-7_27
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